Author:
Despoiniades, Kostas, 1978- author.
ImprintMontréal ; New York : Black Rose Books, [2019]
Imprint2019
Description165 pages ; 22 cm
Note:The anatomist of power. The faces of faceless power: The Trial, The Castle, and beyond -- Amerika. The romantic anti-capitalism of Kafka -- Metamorphosis. The authority of the raging patriarch -- Law, writing, punishment, the body. A visit to the Penal Colony -- The Burrow. The solid foundations of the castle -- Kafka and the anarchists. An obscured relationship -- Kafka and the issue of (anti-)authority. A non-literary discussion.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-165).
Note:"Few twentieth-century writers remain as potent as Franz Kafka--one of the rare figures to maintain both a major presence in the academy and on the shelves of general readers. Yet, remarkably, no work has yet fully focused on his politics and anti-authoritarian sensibilities. The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority is a fascinating new look at his widely known novels and stories (including The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Amerika), portraying him as a powerful critic of authority, bureaucracy, capitalism, law, patriarchy, and prisons. Making deft use of Kafka's diaries, his friends' memoirs, and his original sketches, Costas Despiniadis addresses his active participation in Prague's anarchist circles, his wide interest in anarchist authors, his skepticism about the Russian Revolution, and his ambivalent relationship with utopian Zionism. The portrait of Kafka that emerges is striking and fresh--rife with insights and a refusal to accept the structures of power that dominated his society."-- Provided by publisher.
